The Paris Photo art fair comes to Los Angeles: Photography's new aim

CaptionParis Photo show

Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times

As Paris Photo tests the Los Angeles market for photography, it nods to Hollywood's pictures. The event's setting is Paramount Studios, where soundstages and the New York City back lot provide exhibition space.

As Paris Photo tests the Los Angeles market for photography, it nods to Hollywood's pictures. The event's setting is Paramount Studios, where soundstages and the New York City back lot provide exhibition space. (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times)

The photograph is almost famous: a shot by Kevin Winter of actress Jennifer Lawrence that caught her just as she stumbled on her way to receive an Oscar this year.

The small drawings hanging beneath are less familiar: delicate images by P.E. Sharpe of a sparse figure, stripped of the voluminous Dior dress, in different positions as she recovers from her fall.

It amounts to a strangely intimate meditation on our obsession with celebrity culture, made stranger by its location: The art installation hangs in a soundstage at the Paramount Studios as part of the new art fair Paris Photo Los Angeles, which runs this weekend.

It's the first U.S. spinoff of Paris Photo, widely considered the world's most prestigious photography fair. Instead of a typical convention center setting, the new event consists of 60 galleries and a dozen bookshops filling three soundstages and several fake buildings on the New York back lot (brownstones and loft buildings used in "Friends" and "Seinfeld") with displays of photographs and photo-based work.

Organizers encouraged galleries to think about Hollywood as a theme, inviting into the mix works that explore connections between photography and film as well as the fine — often airbrushed — line between fiction and reality.

New York dealer James Danziger, who commissioned the Jennifer Lawrence installation (priced at $20,000 for the group), brought other works ranging from Warhol Polaroids to recent Old Masters-style portraits by Hendrik Kerstens. Danziger has not participated in a fair in California since the '90s, when L.A.'s longest-running photography fair, Photo L.A., was more robust.

"Los Angeles is the graveyard for art fairs," Danziger said. But he said he was quick to sign up this time when Paris Photo's West Coast venue was announced.

"Paris Photo [in France] has become the No. 1 photographic art fair in the world," he said. "It just remains to be seen if the public and collectors here will warm to it."

Even the fair director sounded cautious. "I hope we draw between 8,000 and 10,000 people," said Julien Frydman, noting that the Paris event, with twice the number of exhibitors, drew 54,000 visitors last year. "We don't want to be boastful. We are learning, and what's important is that the quality of the fair be recognized."

Most work in the fair reflects the galleries' normal exhibition programs, whether they focus on documentary photography or take an edgier conceptual approach. But Frydman is clearly betting on the novelty of an art fair set against the backdrop of a movie studio to draw crowds and spark interesting artist talks, part of a program organized by former Hammer curator Douglas Fogle.

"We are not promoting the film industry," Frydman said. "We are questioning the meaning of images. We're trying to make the fair into a place where you think about the relationship between still and moving images."

While setting up their booths Thursday morning, many dealers seemed to be having fun with the concept, or at least enjoying the fair's indoor-outdoor flow on a sunny day. Some were hanging out and smoking on their New York-style brownstone stoops.

"Usually a fair takes place in convention centers that make you feel you could be anywhere in the world," said Charlie Kitchings of the L.A. gallery Ambach and Rice, a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. "But here we are so clearly in New York — the perfect L.A. meta-experience."

Ambach and Rice is showing work by Martina Sauter, who combines film stills with her own staged photographs taken in her studio in Düsseldorf, Germany. One image shows a snowy mountain landscape juxtaposed with the grainy image of a wood door, only the landscape is really wallpaper in her studio and the door image came from the TV show "Twin Peaks."

Fraenkel Gallery of San Francisco brought a range of gallery artists from Diane Arbus to Katy Grannan, but showcased front and center three large 1993 prints by Hiroshi Sugimoto of historic movie theaters — rich in architecture but empty of content. By exposing his film for the length of the movies, Sugimoto famously produced images of theaters in which the screens form a bright, white blank.

Gallerist Marc Selwyn of Los Angeles decided to bring only images of other images, like an amusing 1973/2000 William Wegman photograph of his dog Man Ray sitting on a crate watching TV, with the TV set on a couch, and a 1986 Robert Heinecken montage that pairs shots of two women broadcasters, Barbara Walters and Faith Daniels. In this booth, the medium is the message.

Brachfeld Gallery of Paris gave over their entire space to images taken in the 1970s by New York photographer David Armstrong documenting his youthful road trips from the city to Cape Cod with friends, a sort of bohemian rhapsody before the age of AIDS. "A lot of his subjects are now living out here," said gallerist Ed Brachfield. A few are famous, like the Coen brothers.

Gallery owner Cheryl Haines of San Francisco devoted her space — the ground floor of a three-story building seen in different guises in the movies "Bridesmaids" and "Spider-Man 3" — to artist Kota Ezawa, who makes animated re-creations of historic photographs.

A slide show by Ezawa clicked away on one side of the room; across the way, light boxes on the wall featured his digital renderings or re-creations: a Civil War photograph, a portrait of Ansel Adams at work, and a 19th century Yosemite landscape by Carleton Watkins.

Many of these galleries carry a wider range of contemporary art along with photography — Perry Rubenstein, Cherry and Martin, and Regen Projects from L.A., Kavi Gupta from Chicago, and Emmanuel Perrotin and Renos Xippas in Paris, to name a few.

Overall they help keep the fair current, showing how artists today will use photographs for conceptual, painterly, sculptural or other ends as suits them.

One trend in abundance here: artists who manipulate or work the surface of their prints in unconventional ways, for example by using materials that paint or stain the paper. This is where wall labels run long and include media such as "codeine and nitric acid on C-print," to quote one for Doug Aitken at Regen Projects.

More generally, the fair holds up a clear mirror to the wide variety of techniques and technologies for concocting and printing images today.

Beyond the Hollywood theme, you can also find some major names of 20th century photography, such as Walker Evans, William Eggleston and Sally Mann. Daniel Blau of Munich and London has staged a sobering exhibition of war images; Taka Ishii of Tokyo has strong images by Japanese greats Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki.

The London gallery Hamiltons brings some panache to the fair, as well as the big guns of fashion photography: Irving Penn, Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton included.

The Hamiltons booth is memorable because the gallery has dressed it up as a sexy, swanky den you might find in a collector's home in the hills above the Chateau Marmont, complete with cushioned wood banquettes against the walls and a wood-burning fireplace (functional but not in use) to the left of Penn's studies of cigarettes.

Hamiltons owner Tim Jefferies said he's been setting up residential-looking booths for various events for a few years now — with the help of British designer Jonathan Reed.

"I don't know many people who live in a museum or a white box," he said. "If you want people to take photography seriously, you need to show them how they might live with it."

Jefferies called his participation in the West Coast edition of Paris Photo a trial. "It's an experiment I think for all of us, because, let's be honest: We're not here for the laughs. We're here to do business."